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How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

He may have wowed the New York critics and audience with his portrayal of a ruthless businessman in his Broadway musical debut.

But Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has claimed he has "no business acumen" and would be "God awful" in the boardroom - despite being one of the highest paid actors in the world.

Speaking exclusively to the Standard after the opening night of the corporate satire How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Radcliffe said he could never make it as a company director.

"I'd be terrible. I have little or no business acumen. It would be a God awful idea and I'd be quite bored," he said.

Radcliffe, 21, plays the unscrupulous J Pierrepont Finch, a window-washer who climbs his way up the corporate ladder and winds up chairman of the board in the revival of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winning show.

He has previously acted in the West End and on Broadway in Peter Shaffer's play Equus but has never before showcased his singing and dancing.

Both previously unknown talents impressed last night's audience, which included Liza Minnelli, Anjelica Huston and Donmar head Michael Grandage, as well as hard-to-please US critics.

Radcliffe told the Standard he was drawn to taking risks in theatre. He said: "I am so much more comfortable out of my comfort zone."To me there's no point in doing it if it's not a challenge, particularly at this stage in my career. I've got plenty of years later if I want to sit back and take it easy if I can. Now is not the time."

He added: "On stage, weirdly, I think I'm a lot less self-conscious than when I'm filming. When you're on film you've got more time to doubt yourself in between takes and more time to analyse. But when you're on stage you just have to get out there and do it."

Radcliffe said the elaborate onstage musical routines amount to his most physically exhausting work ever.

He went on: "It's all very well to do one physical scene on Potter and then it's done. But here I'm doing this eight times a week for the rest of the year so it's a long, long time. That's the challenge - keeping the stamina up."

The actor revealed he had been honing his musical instincts for three years: "It wasn't so much I was hiding from it but more that there wasn't the proper outlet before now. I didn't want to be one of those actors who starts a band to feed their own vanity. I've had singing lessons for three years and it's a pleasure to be out there doing it."

But he expressed reluctance to transfer to the West End, given the show's explicitly American attitude to corporate life: "I don't think as Brits we have the same relationship to big business as being a glamorous place. Although the flipside to that is this would be the right time to satirise big business."

Amid rave reviews for his performance, influential Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote that Radcliffe "is sure to stir maternal instincts among women of all ages (and probably some men too)."

Entertainment Weekly declared: "He seems to tap into an almost bottomless reserve of will power and determination to claim his place in the spotlight of a big-budget Broadway musical."